MUST READS SOCIAL MEDIA TECH BUSINESS ENTERTAINMENT US & WORLD WATERCOOLER JOBS MORE The Virtual Reality Renaissance Is Here, But Are We Ready? 2.2k SHARES WHAT'S THIS? IMAGE: MASHABLE, BOB AL-GREENE BY LANCE ULANOFF / 2014-04-20 21:19:32 UTC This piece is part of Mashable Spotlight, which presents in-depth looks at the people, concepts and issues shaping our digital world. I'm flapping my wings. Not hard, but slowly and smoothly. At 25 feet across, my wingspan is so great I don't need to exert much energy to achieve lift. In the distance, I see an island under an azure sky. This is my home. Off to my west, the sun is setting and the sky glows with warm, orange light. Spotting movement in the ocean below, I bend my body slightly to the left and begin a gentle dive. As I approach the shore, I spot my prey splashing in the shallows. I lean back, keeping my wings fully extended so I can glide just above the water. I'm right over the fish. I pull in my wings, bend forward sharply and dive into the water. I emerge with a fish in my mouth. Success. Better yet, I did all this without ever leaving the ground or getting wet. Lance Ulanoff trying out the American Museum of Natural History's Pterosaur flight simulator. IMAGE: MASHABLE This is virtual reality, or at least the American Museum of Natural History’s (AMNH) brand of semi-immersive virtual reality. With a large projection screen, Microsoft Kinect V1 and a gaming PC, the setup lets you control the flight of a virtual pterosaur by standing in front of the Kinect sensor, flapping your arms and bending. Though I wore no head-mounted display or earphones, the large screen and responsive, stutter-free motion achieved a remarkably immersive effect. As I stood in the darkened room on the fourth floor of the museum, surrounded by the exhibit's curators, developers and swarms of schoolchildren, I found myself experiencing that “floating head” feeling one sometimes gets from virtual reality. “It’s very peaceful to fly in it,” AMNH Director of Exhibition Interactive and Media Hélène Alonso told me. “You sort of lose yourself in it. You forget about yourself.” If a non-profit like AMNH could afford the requisite hardware and expertise to create this experience, could virtual reality for the masses be far off? When done right, VR is that compelling, but it remains a rather esoteric beast, one that engenders visions of Star Trek Holodecks and ridiculous, oversized helmets. Neither is the case, but they help explain virtual reality’s long and somewhat complicated history and how, finally, thanks to new, practical applications, improved convenience and computing power, and plummeting technology costs, it’s on the precipice of a new era. Widespread consumer acceptance and adoption could be just around the virtual corner. The most recent indication of VR's potential mainstream viability is Facebook's purchase of gaming headset Oculus Rift in March. But is that an accurate sign of VR's return or simply an exaggerated uproar because it's Facebook? Even advanced devices like Oculus don't beget applications far beyond gaming — yet. The average consumer still can't picture what the practical applications could be, or even whether we need them at all. Jaron Lanier, writer, computer scientist and futurist. IMAGE: JONATHAN SPRAGUE When scientist and futurist Jaron Lanier cooked up the term “virtual reality” in the 1980s, it was little more than a marketing device. It explained the new virtualization and simulation system he and his team at VPL Research built to help them develop a new programming language. The head-mounted display (HMD) and glove for manipulation became something of a sensation. "All of a sudden we had a company," Lanier told Wired in 1993. "And potential investors would come around and I would show them this thing, and I'd say, 'Now look at this neat language.' And they'd say, 'Language! You're using a glove! My God!' So suddenly the whole focus shifted." Lanier soon graced the covers of the New York Times and Wall Street Journal. It was the first VR boom. “We were in our early 20s," Lanier, now 53, recalled. "I thought we were doing the most important thing humanity had ever encountered.” The excitement surrounding this new frontier in human interaction and engagement was palpable. “There was reason to believe,” said Harold Rheingold, who wrote 1991 book Virtual Reality, “that any applications that let people interact with computers or simulations would be very big.” Lanier and VPL did spark a revolution. Virtual reality‘s impact is evident in everything from the AMNH exhibit to automobile design (Ford’s Immersive Vehicle Environment is particularly impressive), surgical simulations and CNN's guesses at what happened to Malaysian Flight MH370. Consumer VR, however, never quite achieved liftoff. Two people demonstrate the EyePhone system which uses special goggles and a ìDataGloveî, which allows them to see and move objects around in a computer created environment. The EyePhone, developed by VPL Research, is on display at the Texpo Telecommunications Show held in San Francisco June 7, 1989. IMAGE: JEFF REINKING/ASSOCIATED PRESS Mattel bought VPL’s glove and turned it into the Power Glove, and by the mid- 1990s, more than two dozen companies were building consumer-level hardware and software. Most of it worked with your garden-variety PC. The technology, however, had an Erector-Set feel to it — almost none was plug- and-play. Virtual environment-building software, like Virtus VR and Superscape VRT, was complex and expensive (Superscape cost nearly $4,000). Controllers, like InWorld’s VR CyberWand, required users to install a special card in their computers. And the HMDs, like Forte Technologies' VFX1 HMS, which were based on stereoscopic 3D technologies, were often bulky, uncomfortable and expensive ($995). A spread from PC Magazine's March 13, 1995 feature story on Virtual Reality. IMAGE: SCREEN GRAB / ZIFF DAVIS MEDIA All this high-end hardware was plugged into 486 MHz computers that struggled to deliver believable 3D imagery. Worse yet, 1990s-era VR used external infrared receivers dotted around the room. Accurate and real-time are not exactly spot-on descriptions. "Even the slightest detectable lag [in VR] and some people get simulator sickness,” said Rheingold. He wasn’t convinced — even in 1991 — that consumers would want to wear a head-mounted device at all. By the late 1990s, the hype surrounding consumer VR had all but fizzled out. For a time, it seemed as if consumer-level virtual reality would remain primarily the stuff of movies, comic books and TV. It would take decades and a lot of new technology for that to change. Computer processing power, perhaps the chief engine behind believable VR, doubled many times over since the 1990s. Quad- and dual-core 1.5 GHz CPUs in smartphones are now commonplace. Tablets can power 4K video. Sub $50, highly accurate sensors are available in most tablets and smartphones, and you can easily add them to other devices. These changes not only made the post-PC era possible, they rebooted the consumer VR era. But all that technology without activity and inspiration is like a full chessboard without players. Despite the existence of VR-ready consumer-level technology, no one was rushing to build VR for the home. So outside the industry, where was VR thriving? In the lab. Stanford University's Virtual Human Interaction Lab, which recently enjoyed a visit from Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, offers visitors a series of virtual reality experiments. Jeremy Bailenson, Ph.D., founding director of Stanford’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab, said these experiments show participants a different life or experience. Visitors don a bulky, head-mounted display and hold a pair of sensors. In-room sensors track their movements while the HMD projects a new reality Bailenson’s team designed. Stanford Professor Jeremy Bailenson (left) guides CNN's Morgan Spurlock through "The Pit" virtual reality experience. IMAGE: CNN One particularly impactful experiment is called “The Pit.” The premise is simple: You’re in a virtual room when, suddenly, the floor drops away, revealing a 30-foot-deep cavern. All that remains beneath your feet is a narrow plank. It’s disorientating, but recent advances in sensor technology have upped the ante. Bailenson has been doing this for 20 years. “In the last year or two," he explained, “we’ve gotten to the next level.” Jeremy Bailenson is founding director of Stanford University’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab Until recently, there was no direct pathway for VR between lab innovation and consumers' homes. While the enterprise industry continues to use the technology to build cars, perform brain surgery and virtually land troubled planes, consumers aren't marching into Best Buy demanding their VR setups. So what will it take for mainstream consumers to embrace the traditionally cumbersome technology? As with any emerging technology, consumers are only interested in VR as so far as it measurably improves their lives (or enjoyment of their lives) and is easy and affordable. Bailenson’s lab still uses expensive, somewhat proprietary technology largely devoted to psychological experiments: what it feels like to be a different race or gender, for example. He's especially interested in how VR experiences can change attitudes and ideas. One of his VR experiments lets you virtually chop down a giant sequoia, which Bailenson hopes people will remember when they run out to buy another ream of paper. CNN's Morgan Spurlock tries out Stanford VR Lab's simulation gear.